I grew up Evangelical Protestant and, like Moral Orel, it seems very much that in hindsight I took it more seriously than the people who were teaching it to me. I found inconsistencies between what I'd been taught and what was in the 66 book canon so I read the 66 book canon. Doing that, I found that a lot of things I'd been taught weren't true according to the scripture. I also found things about the 66 book canon that I couldn't accept as literally true. I kept searching. I briefly considered myself a Quaker, trusting in the revelation of the Holy Spirit above anything that could be found in a book written and edited by men. I got myself into a kind of weird position with what atheists might call "a god of my own making" while learning about the Sumerian origins of a lot of the "prehistory" parts of the Bible. A long weekend with Robert Green Ingersoll helped me rip off the bandaid or, as Jesus might have put it, find a new wine skin for new wine.
I spent some time as an angry atheist but discovered for me personally that the things I was most angry about wasn't really the religion itself so much as it was what had been done to my by specific people.
Unfortunately, specific religious people keep doing things and using their religion to cover for it. As Dr. Dan McClellan frequently points out, everyone is negotiating with the text. There are people who want us to believe they've found the true meaning of the text and, therefore, we must follow their "murder board" version of Christianity. In Christianity, putting anything before God would be idolatry, even the Bible. Those people haven't just put the Bible ahead of God, they've placed a man's interpretation of the Bible above Christianity. They are idolaters and they've instituted Christian Nationalism in the U.S.
They've taken the right to choose away for many people. They've taken away voting protections for our non-white siblings. They're trying to take voting rights away from women who've had a name change for any reason (including marriage). They've enacted mass bigotry against trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people. They're actively and continuously still rounding up people who don't look white enough and putting them into camps or deporting them to countries they've never been to. All of these things in the name of a Jesus which is hardly recognizable from anything in their book.
I don't know what I am today. Count me in the Nones. I don't believe in a god who created the entire universe. I won't rule out a deistic god (one who set the universe in motion and then fucked off for cigarettes and is content to let us do our own thing). Whether there is something else out there, I don't know. I honor the memory of the people who were in my life. I don't know if I'll see them again after I die. I honor nature but I don't know that there's something deeper out there spiritually representing parts of it. I see some reason to suspect we may reincarnate but I also see how those hints may just come from our own capacity for pareidolia.
Whatever I have, it's a tension between possibilities, many of which I have strong hints are either not true or could never be proven correct. How can I represent that in fiction? I think mainly by not misrepresenting members of faith; by not representing people of any faith as all being on the same page about it; by showing the tension between the louder voices in a faith and the people who actually practice it as a part of their daily lives.
To the extent that faith features in my work, I hope I accomplish that.
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